Neanderthals could create their own culture and political force in the world, says Harvard scientist George Church.

A Harvard scientist has said it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal baby from ancient DNA if he could find a woman willing to act as a surrogate.

The process would not be legal in many countries and would involve using DNA extracted from fossils.

George Church, a genetics professor of Harvard School of Medicine, said that the process was possible and that far from being brutal and primitive, Neanderthals were intelligent beings.

They are believed to be one of the relatives of modern man and became extinct 33,000 years ago. He added that altering the human genome could also provide the answers to curing diseases such as cancer and HIV, and hold the key to living to 120.

He told Der Spiegel, the German magazine: "I have already managed to attract enough DNA from fossil bones to reconstruct the DNA of the human species largely extinct. Now I need an adventurous female human."

The Grand Wizards who brought you genetically modified soy beans and margarine will probably pull it off in the next 30yrs...I think I could be great.

There were different tribes of man; we survived and they didn't. Why not add back some genetic diversity. Get a population of Neanderthals going and then have sex with them and make some homo-neander half breeds.

There were different tribes of man; we survived and they didn't. Why not add back some genetic diversity. Get a population of Neanderthals going and then have sex with them and make some homo-neander half breeds.

Humans have already interbred with Neanderthals, probably including some of your ancestors.

There were different tribes of man; we survived and they didn't. Why not add back some genetic diversity. Get a population of Neanderthals going and then have sex with them and make some homo-neander half breeds.

Humans have already interbred with Neanderthals, probably including some of your ancestors.

Actually, the genetic similarities are most probably due to common ancestry, not interbreeding.

I will support this statement as the few skeletons found a race of people does not make. The conjecture invovled is astounding aswhat is attributed to these supposed neanderthals cannot be deduced by looking at a small amount of dead bones.

Ridiculous. The claims that humans and neanderthals interbred are based on specific genes, not the whole genome.

No, what is ridiculous is buying into the idea that random development could create two distinct and different species that are compatible with each other.

Do you know how difficult it is to recover genetic material from samples well over 1,000 years old. It is very difficult for samples younger than 1,000 years old. With the supposed age of neanderthals obtaining usable DNA defy logic and reason

No, what is ridiculous is buying into the idea that random development could create two distinct and different species that are compatible with each other.

Speciation occurs when two similar organisms are no longer able to produce fertile offspring. Technically if Neanderthal is another species then Humans would not be able to produce fertile offspring with them. So if they are a different species then 12ax7 is right. However, blood lines that would lead to Neanderthals would be compatible with Humans until that speciation event.

Neanderthals could create their own culture and political force in the world, says Harvard scientist George Church.

A Harvard scientist has said it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal baby from ancient DNA if he could find a woman willing to act as a surrogate.

The process would not be legal in many countries and would involve using DNA extracted from fossils.

George Church, a genetics professor of Harvard School of Medicine, said that the process was possible and that far from being brutal and primitive, Neanderthals were intelligent beings.

They are believed to be one of the relatives of modern man and became extinct 33,000 years ago. He added that altering the human genome could also provide the answers to curing diseases such as cancer and HIV, and hold the key to living to 120.

He told Der Spiegel, the German magazine: "I have already managed to attract enough DNA from fossil bones to reconstruct the DNA of the human species largely extinct. Now I need an adventurous female human."

Human DNA, for example is arrayed on 23 pairs of chromosomes, and those chromosomes are unique bodies, each carrying their own subset of genes arrayed in a particular linear order. Chromosomes are complicated structures [. . .], for they contain not just DNA, but specific DNA-associated proteins (“histones”), a “centromere,” a special part of the chromosome which helps it move to a daughter cell when cells divide, and “telomeres,” repeated bits of DNA at the end of chromosomes that protect the chromosome from degrading.

To produce an organism, its genome must be sitting on chromosomes, and on the proper number of chromosomes. You can’t just take a whole genome and stick it into a recipient cell, expecting that cell to behave normally. The genome first has to be assembled in proper order—and that means the perfectly proper order (no room for error here), with all the bits in the right sequence. Then it has to be packaged into those chromosomes, for without chromosomes cells can’t divide properly and you can’t produce a whole organism from that single cloned cell. To get an organism from one cell, there has to be millions of cell divisions.

Not only do we lack the ability to assemble bits of DNA (what we have from Neanderthals) into a complete genome, but we are nowhere close to putting that DNA onto chromosomes in the proper order. Until we do that, we won’t be able to bring back any species from fossil DNA. I doubt that we’ll have this ability within the next 50 years, if that.

But the problems go beyond that. DNA degrades with age, and some types of degradation (like changes of one DNA “base” to another) cannot be detected by sequencing, but would still render the reconstructed clone inviable because those mutations would be lethal in the re-created organism. The genomes of many species, including ours, contain repeated elements dispersed throughout the genome. Much of this is “junk,” some of it may have unknown but essential functions, but all of it would cause problems trying to reconstruct an ancestral DNA sequence. We don’t know exactly how many of these things there are nor exactly where they all sit on the DNA. If you screw that up, you will likely not get a viable “egg.” Finally, trying to assemble bits of fossil DNA (or DNA “cloned” from those fossil sequences) is likely to cause copying errors, creating even more mutations that will make the “clone” inviable.

And, of course, for the Neanderthals we don’t have a complete DNA sequence in order, and there is controversy about how much is original, how much may be contaminated, and so on.